The catch-all
The 326 cases in this chapter are the ones that don't fit cleanly into any of the other six categories: police activity that was not active-shooter or armed-person, building lockdowns triggered by something other than a violent incident, shelter-in-place orders for civil unrest, evacuation orders that were neither hazmat nor weather, threats of violence that did not produce an active-shooter response, workplace violence at university medical centers, public-health incidents that did not rise to the level of a disease outbreak, the COVID-19 institutional communications of 2020-2022, and the small "other" bucket of incidents that fit nowhere else.
This is the chapter's role: every campus alert genre has its edge cases, and the cases here are where institutional writing does its most exploratory work because there is no template to fall back on.
COVID-19: the largest sub-genre
The COVID-19 cases in this chapter concentrate in two moments: the March 2020 closure announcements, and the August and September 2020 reopening-and-outbreak messages as residential campuses came back and dorms hit cluster status. Between and after those two moments, institutions produced a flood of communications (commencement cancellations, quarantine protocols, travel guidance) of which the archive preserves the alert-system slice.
The cases preserved here are a small sample of that vast institutional-communications archive. The selection criteria favored messages that were either consequential (the first closure, the first reopening, the first dorm-outbreak alert) or stylistically distinctive (institutions whose voice during the pandemic was visibly more candid, more uncertain, or more empathetic than their neutral institutional voice). The verbatim text matters because COVID-19 was the first pandemic in the SMS era, and the institutional writing that emerged was self-consciously aware of how strange a campus-wide email from the president had become as a literary form.
Lockdowns that were not active shooters
Several cases here document campus lockdowns that were triggered by something other than a confirmed armed person on campus. Examples include lockdowns issued during off-campus police pursuits where the suspect was believed to have entered campus property, lockdowns issued during multi-agency tactical responses to incidents at adjacent buildings, lockdowns issued in response to bomb threats whose response was operationally identical to an active-shooter response, and lockdowns issued during the rare but real cases of escaped psychiatric patients in proximity to campus medical centers.
The verbatim alert text in these cases is interesting because the institution has to communicate the protective action (shelter in place, lock doors) without communicating an active-shooter threat description, which would be inaccurate. The genre's standard hedge names police activity and a place, asks people to avoid it, and says nothing about why. Whether and when to follow up with a more specific description is the case-by-case judgment call documented here.
Civil unrest
A distinctive subset of cases here document campus alerts issued during civil-unrest events: the 2020 racial-justice protests, the spring 2024 Gaza protest encampments (the Harvard Yard encampment, the Cal Poly Humboldt building occupation, and their contemporaries are case files here), and older cases reaching back decades. The institutional writing here is a different mode, neither emergency nor timely warning, but a kind of campus-update genre that is closer to a press release than to an alert. The cases are preserved because they were sent through the campus alert system and because the language they produced is part of the institutional record.
Workplace violence at medical centers
Several cases here document workplace-violence incidents on and around campus, including at academic medical facilities: the 2023 emergency-department brawl at the University of Chicago Medical Center is a case file here, alongside workplace shootings and threats at ordinary campus workplaces (Yale's 2009 Annie Le case and Prairie View A&M's 2023 employee shooting sit in this genre). Where the incident happens inside a hospital, the protective action turns hospital-specific (department lockdown rather than campus lockdown), and the verbatim text uses a vocabulary the rest of the archive doesn't share.
Public-health incidents that were not COVID-19
A larger set of cases predate or postdate the COVID-19 era and document other public-health alerts: the 2009 H1N1 outbreak communications (Amherst, Emory, Kansas, TCU, and Washington State all have case files here), the meningitis B outbreaks at Princeton and UC Santa Barbara in 2013 and the deaths at Drexel and San Diego State in 2014, and the 2014 mumps outbreaks at Ohio State and Fordham. The institutional voice in these cases is closer to the timely-warning genre than to the emergency-notification genre: slower, more careful, more likely to direct readers to the campus health center than to a protective action.
What this chapter teaches
Two patterns:
The catch-all chapter is where genre conventions get invented. When an incident doesn't fit a template, the institution has to compose the message from scratch, and the cases preserved here are some of the most interesting institutional writing in the archive precisely because of that.
The COVID-19 sub-genre will eventually be its own chapter. The pandemic produced more campus communications than any other event in the modern alert era, and the writing that emerged is distinctive enough that future versions of this archive may break it out as a standalone category. For now it lives here, with the other ones-of-a-kind.
The case list below is the most varied in the archive. Read it for the institutional voices that broke their own templates.